Gadgetory

one week ago at our first-ever LTX 2017 we previewed for real AMD thread ripper performance thanks to Alienware but come on - that was just a preview you only did one benchmark you're such a tease I know but that was then and this is now Alienware has arranged for their system to be exclusively reviewed before the formal embargo lifts for Rison thread ripper so let's uh rip it open tano bear four teams makes it easy to secure your Wi-Fi on any network and comes with priority support and easy team management try it for free at the link below now we usually focus on pre-built desktop PCs where there's something truly standout about them otherwise we'd be reviewing every Best Buy special that hit the shelves back in 2014 the cool thing about the all-new area 51 was the rotated motherboard tray and the Triad design with RGB lighting and design wise not much has changed if you liked it then you'll like it now and vice versa what stands out now though is the internals so let's pop the panel and show you around the irony of a DVD burner on something that's trying to look like alien technology isn't lost on me but the rest of the i/o is what I would describe as suitably futuristic we've got dual USB 300 and a card reader at the front with lots more USB 3 at the back including a type C port opening up the other side reveals that these aliens are the type to cram everything under the bed when their alien mom asks them to clean their room and we also find a trio of three-and-a-half inch hard drive mounts and a companion dual two-and-a-half inch mount for SATA SSDs perfectly adequate for future upgrades what's not perfect about the case is its unwieldly Ness the chassis itself makes generous use of steel which makes it strong sure but also super heavy considering that there's only a single hard drive and a single 120 millimeter a IO cooler in there and there aren't any obvious handholds making it quite difficult to get a grip on it a combination that totally has no relevance whatsoever two instances in the past where in things may or may not have escaped my grip through no fault of my own who all of these systems come configured with AMD Rison thread Ripper in the 1950 X variant we're talking 16 cores and 32 threads on this CPU that also happens have 40 megabytes of cash seriously it has more cash than the 286 era hard drive that a fan brought to LTX for me to sign it also features 64 PCI Express lanes allowing it to run up to three graphics cards at full PCI Express 16x Gen 3 speeds for 3-way crossfire or for workstation use with plenty of PCIe lanes to spare for the onboard Wi-Fi SATA controller for hard drive and an MDOT 2 slot that houses a 256 gig SanDisk a 400 nvme SSD so now then let's meet the challengers rx 299 test bench with its core I 970 900 X skylake X CPU is the most obvious analog from the blue team given its similar price but we'll be including results from our mainstream platforms as well kicking things off then our our gaming tests which should surprise no one this is an alienware after all with rise of the Tomb Raider we're looking at pretty similar but slightly worse performance overall while our synthetics put it pretty much on par with the core i9 we are planning to run more thread refer gaming benchmarks but those will have to wait for the full review moving on to productivity we see pretty much what we expected to see major wins in multi-threaded workloads the biggest victories though come in blender it's time to render beats out the core i9 test bench by 37 seconds in the BMW test and by over 2 minutes in the classroom sample day am I don't pull that off very well do i anyway we do have to note though that we found that our Centauri axe cooler really struggled red ripper fully chilled and running its best and after swapping in our own with a fresh application of thermal compound so then who is the area 51 thread Ripper Edition 4 at 4,000 US Dollars aspect to be brutally honest we're not quite sure I mean there are actually a lot of exceptions to the conventional wisdom that it would be cheaper to build your own gaming PC like Dells own also AMD based inspiring gaming desktop that we'll be reviewing soon but the area 51 costs like a boutique system with some significant drawbacks an unexceptional motherboard with only four dimm slots rather than eight and limited overclocking options unsightly exposed PCBs on the RAM and exposed bare steel on the to alien where's credit beefy and modular 1500 watt power supplies along with and this is by far the worst one frankly inadequate cooling the area 51 runs almost as hot and loud as a laptop under synthetic load and at this size and weight there's no excuse for that bottom line men if you really want the area 51 as a status symbol alien where is the first place you can get your hands on a prebuilt thread Ripper system but understand that the early adopter tax you'll be paying is in more than money I am fully expecting boutique systems built around this platform for this price with better cooling and cable management in the coming months so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured add the link in the video description also down there we have our t-shirt store where you can buy cool shirts like this one yeah I'm wearing one and our community forum which you should totally join